


under the spell of familiar hands

by blackeyedblonde



Category: True Detective
Genre: ASMR, Gen, Headcanon Study, M/M, Pre-Canon thru Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-29
Updated: 2015-01-29
Packaged: 2018-03-09 13:38:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,919
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3251765
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackeyedblonde/pseuds/blackeyedblonde
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first time it happens, watching his father’s hands, the movements make him warm and sleepy, lulled and languid despite the gore and the gristle and blood. Wine-red stains the dressing table and something syrupy and hot bursts gently at the base of Rust’s skull, running down his spine and into his hands until goosebumps prick up on the backs of his arms.</p><p>He doesn’t know what it is, doesn’t have a word for it, but he likes it—craves it sometimes, maybe, in the cold and dark where there’s no warmth or sleep to be found.</p>
            </blockquote>





	under the spell of familiar hands

**Author's Note:**

  * For [starfoozle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/starfoozle/gifts), [badwips](https://archiveofourown.org/users/badwips/gifts).



> Alrighty, so this might be a weird one for some of y'all, but I'm putting it out there anyhow. This fic is based solely on my personal headcanon that along with his synesthesia, Rust experiences something known as [ASMR](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_sensory_meridian_response). I know it looks pretty bizarre in practice written out here if you aren't familiar with the sensation, but let me assure you, it is _NOT_ a sexual thing. Just something that I think would align well with his sensory experiences, given context from the show...and also totally gratuitous self-fanservice, so I am sorry for that.
> 
> I want to dedicate this to several people: firstly to starfoozle, who shares my thoughts and helped spur this into happening, and also to badwips, from whom I lifted the headcanon about Rust having false teeth after an unfortunate incident during the Crash era. Please be sure to check out her ficlet collection, [Openings and Meetings](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3238082/chapters/7053674), to see the original inspiration.

 

When he’s five years old, Rust learns that he likes watching his father dress and skin game.

The rabbit on the block out back is soft and brown and freshly dead as of dawn. She has a velvet pink nose and black button eyes with the shine rubbed off now, a little bit of red staining her yellowed teeth, a larger slash of it at her throat where she’d been hanging off the porch railing all morning and leaving a wide pool of blood in the dirt below.

Travis will douse the spot with a splash of gasoline later and kick some dirt over it. Rust knows that this is _to_ _keep the wild critters from coming up to fuck around the house at night—you gotta cover your messes up, son._ He doesn’t ask Pop what the difference is between the cold blood on the ground and the warmer stuff pumping steady through his heart. He tells himself stories about wild animals that can’t lap it up when it’s hot, burning their soft tongues on the steaming red, having learned to blow on it until it’s gone cool enough to taste.

But when Travis lays the rabbit out on the block and slices into her stomach, pulls out the soft insides and drops a handful of them into a steel bucket, Rust will watch his hands. Big and strong and scarred deep between the first two knuckles on the one he uses to write, two hands that have cuffed Rust on the back of the head hard enough to make his knees buckle, two hands that hold him steady and part gentle through his hair when Pop gets that far-off light in his eye and starts talking about places where there’s no snow and all jungle.

His hands move slow and steady as they work, skinning soft fur away from the raw pink, tapping and scraping the broadside of the knife along the edge of the block in a rolling kind of rhythm, needless as it is, and this is something Rust will recall as _habitual_ or _ceremonial_ thirty years and a thousand miles away from now—though here, five years old and standing out in a brisk midmorning between spring and summer, it’s a small and strange comfort.

The first time it happens, watching his father’s hands, the movements make him warm and sleepy, lulled and languid despite the gore and the gristle and blood. Wine-red stains the dressing table and something syrupy and hot bursts gently at the base of Rust’s skull, running down his spine and into his hands until goosebumps prick up on the backs of his arms.

He doesn’t know what it is, doesn’t have a word for it, but he likes it—craves it sometimes, maybe, in the cold and dark where there’s no warmth or sleep to be found. And it happens again and again, when he stands and watches Travis dress game, until Rust is old enough start dressing the kills himself. And then the feeling is gone, melted away like thin frost at daybreak, no magic there in his own two hands while they carve and skin and prepare the dead.

But there’s also the popping of a wet-wood fire, watching a grouse cluck to her chicks and call them close, the way his second-grade teacher leans over him at his desk and speaks softly in her thick accent, warm words stirring up the tingling warmth in his head.

Later, these are the sounds and sights in Alaska that Rust will tuck away in the pockets of a thick fleece-lined coat, details kept for himself that are only sparingly remembered.  
  


* * *  
  


Claire catches him staring while she weaves a braid into her dark hair, perched on the edge of the bed with the soft swell of her stomach bare and striped with sunlight slanting in through the window blinds. She is beautiful, and there will be time for touching her later—this woman he loves, this woman who doesn’t take any of his bullshit, this woman carrying his child.

For now, he watches her hands.

Fine-boned fingers a few shades darker than his, long and slender with one newly banded in gold, leisurely, carefully, methodically twisting a fishtail into the hair that falls to the middle of her back. It’s slow work but he’s caught in her hands like a trance, sliding strand-by-strand back into the warmth of something like dazed sleep.

“You could stand to learn this, if the baby’s a girl,” Claire says softly, hands still moving on their own accord. She can feel his eyes on her even without looking.

Rust is naked under the sheet and it’s the tail-end of August in Texas, hotter than a fired brick outside and almost too warm for comfort in their apartment, but the goosebumps crop up on his skin anyways, rushing across his senses in a surge of prickly pleasure like yellow and pink and sour-sweet clementine.

“Maybe,” he murmurs as she finishes and ties off the end with a band, turning to slide back in close up against his side. “Kinda like watching you do it, though.”  
  


* * *  
  


There’s only six inches of bathwater in the tub but Sophia still goes hell-bent on splashing him until his undershirt is halfway soaked, smacking rubber bath toys into the suds even while Rust fills up a plastic cup under the faucet and tips her head back to rinse.

“We gonna play, daddy?” she asks, looking up at him with water droplets clinging to her eyelashes, and he raises his eyebrows in mock surprise.

“You keep on with all this splashing, there isn’t gonna be any water left to play in,” he says, getting the last of the shampoo out of her hair before maneuvering around to sit on the floor by the tub. “You think you’re clean enough yet?”

“Squeak- _y_ clean,” Sophia says, wrinkling her nose, and Rust hums as he picks up a plastic dinosaur standing near the drain and marches it down to her, pretending to stop and attack a yellow duck along the way.

Sophia has other plans, though, and is busy mounding bubbles into the cup until they’re in a frothy peak at the top. “Ice creams,” she says, seriously, and passes it off to Rust before picking up a plastic donut floating in the water.

“Where’s the whippy cream?” she asks, looking around, and Rust sighs but reaches up and pulls his can of shaving cream off the back of the toilet tank. He squirts a white dollop into her hand and watches while she squeezes it between her tiny fingers, frosting it over the donut with little _shhsh_ ing sound effects whistling between her lips.

“Cook dinner for you, daddy,” Sophia says, and takes the plastic cup full of dying bubbles back to pretend she’s doing just that, mixing water and shaving cream and using the long neck of the dinosaur toy to stir it all together in the cup.

She goes about her cooking in a series of small splashes and plastic gently clicking on plastic, concentrating on the soap and toys like they’re the real thing come to life. Rust turns the faucet back on to a low drizzle, letting more warm water fill up the bath, and then props his chin on his forearm at the edge of the tub to close his eyes while that familiar syrupy warmth soaks into him. The air’s soft to the touch and smells like the clean sweetness of baby shampoo, something he wants to wrap himself in and doze off to beneath the soothing blanket of sound while Sophia plays in the water.

In another lifetime, a long time from now, when there’s no Sophia and no Claire and he’d sooner die than step foot back in a little town in Texas, Rust will catch a whiff of that warm smell again for the first time in something like thirty years.

He’ll sit crying on the bathroom floor until a man with greying blonde hair can get the grandbaby out of the tub and wrapped up in a towel, whispering furiously, almost scared, _what’s wrong with you, talk to me Rust, tell me, you gotta tell me what’s wrong._  
  


* * *  
  
  


Four years undercover and his senses are scourged raw under the burn of booze and smoke and fire that flows through Crash’s veins like acid-laced water. There are plenty of hands in Crash’s life, plenty of sounds and smells. None of them good. None of them anything he wants to look at too long, lest he gets a _Q-for-fuckin-queer_ carved into his face with a box cutter and his teeth knocked down his throat.

That last thing happens anyhow, right there at the end but for reasons unrelated to being caught looking, and he’s been running his tongue over the newness of the pretty, perfectly-square teeth in his mouth this whole session while the therapist reads off something hidden in a manila envelope.

His whole life, now, filed into manila fucking envelopes. He’s been in Northshore for two weeks. Most days, he still wakes up and thinks he’s Crash.

The therapist has auburn hair that didn’t come from a bottle and a slight lisp on hard _s_ ’s. Other people might find it endearing if they paid enough attention to care but the lisp is something Rust hones in on with a rapt hyper-focus, counting each _s_ that rolls off her tongue until he loses mental tally at forty-two when a black ring of light opens up on the white wall and he has to start over.

She’s been scrawling out words on a legal pad, a quiet scritch-scratching that he watches until he starts fading off into a lulled daze, and he knows his own eyes have betrayed him when she stops writing and clears her throat.

“Mr. Cohle?” the therapist asks, watching him over the tops of her little gold glasses. He waits for the soft lisp on the harsh _s_ of his name and is duly rewarded. “Rustin?”

There’s a weakness in that, the old feeling of quiet warmth tied to sure hands and small sounds, and Crash is back to kill it before it even fully hits him.

“Did they assign me to you because your speech is fucked up?” he asks, whistling sharp around his new teeth on _assign_ like that ridiculous stuttering cartoon cat, and he hates it, hates it, goddamn fucking hates it. “Like I’d find some ounce of bullshit solace in sharing that with you, when you talk like a jenny who’s been tongue-sucking dick all night for free?”

When they assign him a different therapist, a man with a grey beard and dark eyes who takes notes with a felt-tip marker and sounds like wet gravel, Rust finds he misses listening to her talk.  
  


* * *  
  


Up in Louisiana, Rust lets himself start watching people again. Their hands, their soft little movements, the way they finger their key rings and tap fake nails on plastic gas station cups. Tells himself it’s part of the job when he knows he’s always enjoyed it, then puts on his sleepy eyes and keeps on looking anyway.

Marty Hart is not a person Rust would be apt to call relaxing—bursting at the seams with heavy hip swagger, gap-toothed laughter and everything he thinks he is and even more—, but he’s sure as shit methodical about certain things. Sitting across from Rust at his desk on Monday mornings, still bleary-eyed with pillow lines pressed into one cheek, tearing the tops off sugar packets one by one and pouring them into his coffee. He’ll sit and organize his paperclips by size and color, smooth out creases in his paperwork, tap a finger against the side of his coffee cup when he’s caught up in thinking about something for a case.

He catches Rust staring at his hands one day while he’s pecking out a report on the typewriter. Just sitting there with a cigarette burning in one hand, unblinking, eyes filled to the brim with a drowsy kind of fog.

“Are you having a fucking stroke?” Marty asks, hands still poised over the typewriter keys, and Rust shakes himself out of it, the tingling shiver running through him so heavy he almost prays Marty can’t see it.

“No,” he says, snuffing his cigarette out and picking up his ledger and opening it in his lap, the one Marty watches him throw up like a shield and cling to like a security blanket.

Marty grunts and resumes his typing. “You get this funny look on your face sometimes,” he says, shaking his head a little but not looking up again. “Need to get laid, man.”

“That your fucking cure-all?” Rust asks, tapping another cigarette out of his pack and putting it between his teeth, burning the thought of Martin Hart’s hands away when the flame on his old zippo sparks into light.  
  


* * *  
  


The wreckage of his life culminates with a swirling void and an eight-inch hunting knife sunk so deep into his gut that it almost kisses his spine. Marty’s there, right before and then always after, and Rust takes comfort in knowing that at least in the small ways, he hasn’t changed a bit.

Marty will flip his plastic ketchup bottles and smack the top against the table three times without fail, fucking new-and-improved squeeze bottles be damned. Licks his index finger to turn every other page, tears the tops off Splenda packets one by one in place of white cane sugar, and is still real methodical about shit—namely, helping Rust clean and dress the stitched carvings left in his arm and stomach, all gentle, orderly hands as he unwraps squares of gauze and clips off pieces of surgical tape like he’s wrapping a fucking present.

In this new epoch of his life, Rust will perch at the kitchen bar and watch Marty slice fresh strawberries into a bowl by the sink, thumb pressing the dull side of the knife through the tops one by one. He sits out back in the sun with his sketchbook and listens to the wind rustle through the oaks, watching from a distance as a mockingbird builds herself a nest in the pink crepe myrtle tree one twig at a time, flitting across the yard to the dryer lint Marty doesn’t know Rust saw him put out there the morning before. They end up with a fucking cat, this tiny little wisp of a thing even full-grown with a tail like a squirrel, and she curls up under Rust’s chin on the mornings when he manages to sleep in, purring so loud and heavy it thrums down deep in his bones.

And maybe he and Marty go on fucking dates nowadays, though neither would be too quick to call them that even with a gun held point-blank to their head, but that’s what they are. Most often a trip to the movies and dinner and then come back home for an honest fuck, but sometimes Marty gets a wild hair and calls in a reservation somewhere, breaks out the ironing board and makes it something fancy.

Marty’s a creature of habit, Rust knows. Somebody who enjoys the process of a well-thumbed routine enough that it becomes a ritual, and that’s all well and good, because as much as Marty likes doing things in a familiar kind of formula, Rust likes to sit and watch him even more.

He takes his time with getting ready on those nights, preoccupied with cleaning up sharp and looking his best, going through the practiced motions one at a time. Belt threaded through each loop with the buckle clinking soft, socks and shoes always on the left foot before the right, tie tied and re-tied if it doesn’t come out right the first time, fingers looping the end through the knot with a thread of tightness pulled between his eyes.

Rust will sit on the closed toilet lid or the edge of the bed to watch him sometimes, and these days Marty doesn’t snap at him for it, doesn’t blush and stammer and balk under familiar blue eyes. He’ll fasten his watch around his wrist, straighten his shirtsleeves, slide on his gold ring, smile just enough to give himself away and say, “Never understand how much you get off on watching me do this shit.”

And Rust’s brain will be lit up like a softer kind of solar flare, honey-thick warmth bleeding down through his limbs and the column of his spine, sleepy-eyed under the spell of Marty’s deft little movements and the soft sounds he makes as he shuffles around the bed and bathroom.

“Ain’t like that,” Rust says, blinking out of it a little bit. “Something else.”

“Mmhmm,” Marty hums, and runs a comb through his hair one more time before stepping up close in front of Rust to straighten his tie a little. “Something else, then.”

“Relaxes me, is all,” Rust tells him, letting Marty pull him to his feet, suddenly feeling a little warm despite himself. “Just like watching you—do shit, I don’t know.”

“And here you let me go all this time without knowing the full power of my own strength,” Marty says, and Rust slants him a narrow look but lets Marty guide him out the front door into the balmy evening air without a word.

There’s another warm kind of feeling, maybe, though he’s not too lost on what to call this one.

 

 


End file.
